Join us at Laurier

Becoming a Golden Hawk means more than just cheering on our (really good) varsity teams – it means being a student who cares about your community, who works hard in the classroom, and who takes advantage of all the learning opportunities that can happen outside the classroom, too.

Biography / Academic Background

My research and my teaching focus on four overlapping fields of inquiry: first, the recovery of neglected primary and secondary texts in Canada and how the recovery of such texts can impact Canadian literary culture; second, the increasingly arbitrary line between texts about young people but aimed at a general readership and texts for young people, particularly the implications of that distinction in terms of generic and age-based readership categories; third, the ways that print texts recirculate culturally and gain renewed currency in the form of new editions, abridgements, supplementary texts and franchises, stage and screen adaptations, commodity and tourist industries, and fan-created online texts; and fourth, the ways in which print, screen, and material texts circulate in the international marketplace. A major thread that links these fields of inquiry concerns depictions, in print or on screen, of young people, who are figured either as role models whom actual young people are encouraged to emulate, symbols of the future or of pre-socialized spontaneity that most adults have been socialized to repress, or both at once.

The work of L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942) and its derivatives have been at the centre of my research program for almost two decades. Not only does my work encompass the vast set of primary texts of an author whose popularity and influence persist more than a century after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, but also it traces the extent of her cultural footprint in adaptations and tourist sites, copyright and trademark legislation, book history, online communities, periodical culture, the archive, and the reception of these Canadian texts in markets around the world. My six books on this author include a three-volume critical anthology, The L.M. Montgomery Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2013–15), which consists of rare essays by Montgomery, interviews with her, commentary and scholarship on her work, coverage of her death and funeral, and reviews of her books, and an edition of her rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted (Penguin Canada, 2009), which was reissued as a Penguin Modern Classics Edition in 2018. I recently prepared and introduced a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Anne of Green Gables (2017). I am now editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library (University of Toronto Press), which collects Montgomery's extensive periodical work, beginning with A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917 (2018) and A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921 (2019).

Since 2010, I have taught courses in English, Youth and Children’s Studies, and Social and Environmental Justice (formerly Contemporary Studies) on Laurier’s Brantford and Waterloo campuses. Throughout my career, I have also held visiting appointments at several universities across Canada and one in the United Kingdom, and I am affiliated with the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, the Institute for Child and Youth Studies, and the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre.

PhD in English (McMaster University)

MA in English (University of Guelph)

BA Hons. in English Literature (Concordia University)

Research Interests / Ongoing Projects

I am currently busy with new projects on adolescent fiction, long-form serial television, Canadian adult fictions of childhood, periodical texts, and cross-media adaptations, in addition to editing two book series: the Early Canadian Literature series (Wilfrid Laurier University Press), which returns to print rare texts deserving of reconsideration in the canon of Canadian literature, and The L.M. Montgomery Library (University of Toronto Press), which collects for the first time the extensive periodical work of the author of Anne of Green Gables.

Awards and Achievements

PROSE Award for Literature, Association of American Publishers, for The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print; Volume 2: A Critical Heritage; Volume 3: A Legacy in Review (UTP, 2013–15), 2016

“What’s in a Name? Towards a Theory of the Anne Brand.” In Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables, edited by Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre, 192–211. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

“Agency, Belonging, Citizenship: The ABCs of Nation-Building in Contemporary Canadian Texts for Adolescents.” Canadian Literature 198 (Autumn 2008): 91–101. Special issue: “Canada and Its Discontents.”